Big Tech Snuffing Free Speech; Google's Poisonous 'Dragonfly'

If the big social media companies choose what to publish and what not to publish, they should be subject to the same licensing and requirements as media organizations.

Google has decided it will not renew a contract with the Pentagon for artificial intelligence work because Google employees were upset that the technology might be used for lethal military purposes. Yet Google is planning to launch a censored search engine in China that will empower a totalitarian "Big Brother is watching you" horror state.

A Media Research Center report found that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube stifle conservative speech and that in some instances staffers have admitted that doing so was intentional.

Chinese officials prevented a journalist, Liu Hu, from taking a flight because he had a low "social credit" score. According to China's Global Times, as of the end of April 2018, authorities had blocked individuals from taking 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed rail trips.

Google is reportedly planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, code-named "Dragonfly," which will aid and abet a totalitarian "Big Brother is watching you" horror state. (Image source: [Photo of woman] iStock)

The internet, especially social media, has become one of the primary places for people to exchange viewpoints and ideas. Social media is where a considerable part of the current national conversation takes place.

Arguably, big tech companies, such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, therefore carry a responsibility to ensure that their platforms are equally accessible to all voices in that national conversation. As private commercial entities, the social media giants are not prima facie legally bound by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and are free to set their own standards and conditions for the use of their platforms. Ideally, those standards should be applied equally to all users, regardless of political or other persuasion. If, however, these companies choose what to publish and what not to publish, they should be subject to the same licensing and requirements as media organizations.

The current media giants' favoring one kind of political speech over another -- progressive over conservative -- and even shutting down political speech that does not conform to the views of the directors, certainly skews the national political conversation in a lopsided way that conflicts with basic principles of democratic freedom of speech and what presumably should be the obligations of virtual monopolies.

The question of whether such discrimination against conservative viewpoints constitutes a breach of law is currently the subject of a number of lawsuits. In October 2017, PragerU, a conservative educational website, filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for "intentional" censorship of conservative speakers, saying that they were "engaging in an arbitrary and capricious use of their 'restricted mode' and 'demonetization' to restrict non-left political thought."

PragerU claimed that "Google and YouTube's use of restricted mode filtering to silence PragerU violates its fundamental First Amendment rights under both the California and United States Constitutions," YouTube, for instance, restricted a video by a pro-Israel Muslim activist, discussing how best to resist hatred and anti-Semitism, as "hate speech". The US District Court Judge in the case, Lucy Koh, however, dismissed PragerU's claims because Google, as a private company, is not subject to the First Amendment. "Defendants are private entities who created their own video-sharing social media website and make decisions about whether and how to regulate content that has been uploaded on that website," Koh wrote. PragerU has appealed the decision.

In August, Freedom Watch filed a $1 billion class-action lawsuit against Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, claiming that they act in concert to suppress conservative speech online. Freedom Watch claims, among other things, that the four media giants have violated the First Amendment to the Constitution and that they have engaged "in a conspiracy to intentionally and willfully suppress politically conservative content."

PragerU and Freedom Watch are not the only conservatives to have experienced suppression of their voices on social media. In April, the conservative Media Research Center released a report detailing the suppression of conservative opinions on social media platforms.

The 50-page report, "Censored! How Online Media Companies Are Suppressing Conservative Speech," which looked at how conservative political speech fared on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, found that the tech companies stifle conservative speech and that in some instances, staffers have admitted that doing so was intentional. The report found that Google showed a "tendency toward left-wing bias in its search results", and that Twitter (by admission of its own employees) had "shadow-banned" some conservative users. ("Shadow banning" means that their content did not appear to other users, but the account owners themselves had not been notified of this "banning" of their content).

The apparent leftist bias, however, not only shows itself in the suppression of conservative speech on social media giants' websites. Censorship and selective presentation of speech has also led to unfortunate policy decisions by some of the big tech companies. Google, for example, has decided it will not renew a contract with the Pentagon for artificial intelligence work when it expires next year, because Google employees were upset that the technology they were working on might be used for lethal military purposes.

Yet, according to leaked documents, Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, code-named "Dragonfly," which will aid and abet a totalitarian "Big Brother is watching you" horror state. China, according to the Economist, is planning to become "the world's first digital totalitarian state." The Chinese government is in the process of introducing a "social credit" system by which to score its citizens, based on their behavior. Behavior sanctioned by the government increases the score; behavior of which the government disapproves decreases the score. Jaywalking, for example, would decrease the score. China is reportedly installing 626 million surveillance cameras throughout the country for the purpose of feeding the social credit system with information.

According to Gordon G. Chang, Chinese officials are using the social credit system for determining everything from being able to take a plane or a train, to buying property or sending your children to a private school. Officials prevented a journalist, Liu Hu, from taking a flight because he had a low score. According to China's state-owned Global Times, as of the end of April 2018, authorities had blocked individuals from taking 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed rail trips. "If we don't increase the cost of being discredited, we are encouraging discredited people to keep at it," said the former deputy director of the development research center of the State Council, Hou Yunchun. He added that an improved social credit system was needed so that "discredited people become bankrupt".

According to a legal expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, Zhi Zhenfeng:

"How the person is restricted in terms of public services or business opportunities should be in accordance with how and to what extent he or she lost his credibility.... Discredited people deserve legal consequences. This is definitely a step in the right direction to building a society with credibility."

The goal, straightforwardly, is to control citizen behavior by aggregating data from various sources such as cameras, identification checks, and "Wi-Fi sniffers" so that Chinese citizens will end up being controlled completely. As Chinese officials have reportedly put it, the purpose of the score card system is to "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step."

It is, in other words, an excellent deliberate tool to suppress the human rights of the Chinese people.

Although Google has refused to comment on the concerns about Dragonfly, the leaked documents indicate that this censored version of Google's search engine will help the Chinese government do just that by blacklisting websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest. It will also, reportedly, link users' searches to their personal phone numbers, thereby making it possible for the Chinese government to detain or arrest people who search for information that the Chinese government wishes to censor.

"Linking searches to a phone number would make it much harder for people to avoid the kind of overreaching government surveillance that is pervasive in China," said Cynthia Wong, senior internet researcher with Human Rights Watch. Fourteen organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Access Now, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, PEN International, and Human Rights in China, have demanded that Google stop its plans for a censored search engine. They say that such cooperation would represent "an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights" and could result in the company "directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations."

In a recent speech, US Vice President Mike Pence also asked Google to end Dragonfly: it "will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers," he said.

So, while Google claims it has moral qualms about cooperating with the US government, the company evidently has no moral issues when it comes to cooperating with Communist China in censoring and spying on its billion citizens with a view to rewarding or punishing them via opportunities in real life. Google employees, according to the Intercept, have circulated a letter stating that the censored search engine raises "urgent moral and ethical issues," and saying that Google executives need to "disclose more about the company's work in China, which they say is shrouded in too much secrecy, according to three sources with knowledge of the matter".

Google is apparently all too eager to work with China on micromanaging its citizens, and there is plenty to work on, according to a recent Amnesty International report :

"China has intensified its campaign of mass internment, intrusive surveillance, political indoctrination and forced cultural assimilation against the region's Uighurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups."

Up to 1 million people have been detained in "China's mass re-education drive," many of them tortured, according to the report.

Eight years ago, Google co-founder Sergey Brin -- who was born in the highly repressive Soviet Union -- at least had the decency to hesitate on (if not turn down) doing business in China if it involved censorship. "[W]e have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results," Google had announced two days before "company spokesman Scott Rubin started singing a different tune."

Perhaps totalitarian Communist repression is of no consequence to Google, so long as it gets still more market share?

Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

Comment on this item

12 Reader Comments

Jeremi Magellanor • Nov 10, 2018 at 09:44

The phrase "Fall of America" suggests some cataclysmic event ended the American empire which had stretched from Maine to California and Florida to Washington. But at the end, there was no straining at the gates, no barbarian horde that dispatched the Empire in one fell swoop. Rather, the empire fell slowly, as a result of challenges from within and without, and changing over the course of hundreds of years until its form was unrecognizable."

This appears to be happening in America now with the islam infiltration, the democrats hating anyone but themselves(like the muslims-destroy the non-muslim while smiling at them), the liberal left haters like Soros, obama, hollywood elites, the left sponsored invasions/caravans of our borders, pounding on the doors of freedom of speech. Google and social media is just a tool with which to close conservative freedom of speech and when there is objection all hell breaks loose. Why don't you haters of America wake up???

I am proud that President Trump is taking China to task as China has been on the receiving end for a very long with nothing in balance. Also, their human rights are horrible along with other communist minded countries.

I would not trust China and many other countries who hate us but don't mind using us to the hilt.

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Martti O. Suomivuori • Oct 20, 2018 at 01:59

Google and the Chinese government share common goals so it is quite expected that they co-operate. The problem is to govern a huge and diverse population in such a way that sectarian violence is subdued before it flames up to an insurgency. China has not forgotten the famine of the Mao years nor the humiliation of the Colonial era. They want to stand united and strong. To them, diversity is NOT a source of strength, quite the opposite.Google has been acquiring the means to become the global government. They are doing it under 'no politics' banner and also in the name of freedom of expression and free access to information. Until recently, Google's political ambitions were held hidden but from the internal memos, we can gather their agenda.They want peace.
Who doesn't?It is just a question of whose peace will it be.

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Oren Wysocki • Oct 17, 2018 at 22:30

Left wingers in close to 50 communist nations have arrested, imprisoned and hanged millions of secular right wingers for believing in capitalism, property rights, the right to life, freedom of speech, the right for secular right wingers to have representation in completely homogenous nations long before competing claims of racism were debated. So how can the left claim that it is ok to discriminate against the right because they don't make people feel safe when there is a long history of millions of right wingers being executed by left wingers documented in dozens of nations over decades?

Secular right wingers and religious right wingers have also had their equal right to representation in the government, its institutions and the media violated in easy to document offenses like the number of people opposing gay marriage, the percentage of people who believe that human biology has scientific limitations and preferable behaviors and non preferable behaviors that influence the outcomes of the emotional well being of the humans involved in unnatural behaviors. In G-d I trust.

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Art • Oct 17, 2018 at 20:23

Google and friends are tough, and confrontational in the US but wimps before the Chinese. In China they meekly submit, out of cowardice and greed, to the Chinese demands. The predecessor of IBM assisted the Germans during WWII and allowed them to use the information of the various census reports to kill undesirables and control the populace. We have a modern equivalent.

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Bisley • Oct 17, 2018 at 17:48

Nearly all major internet and tech companies are run by leftists, hire primarily leftists, and use their control over the flow of information to promote their ideology, and to censor and disparage anyone and anything that might present an alternative. Doing similar things (and much more) for a communist Chinese government, that most of them would probably view more favorably than the present US government, is not likely to go very much against their principles -- particularly when they stand to make billions of dollars from it. I expect that most of the senior people at Google, Facebook, etc. would be in favor of a system of "social credits" in the US, as long as there was a socialist government to oversee it.

These socialist fools, along with their comrades who control most of the education, news, and entertainment industries, will destroy what's left of the freedom and capitalism that underpins western civilization, unless some way is found to break their control over most of the information that reaches the public.

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Michael Poretsky • Oct 17, 2018 at 11:32

Let's remember that Google's primary aim (regardless of what they may piously preach) is to make money for their shareholders. Their business decisions are all made with that goal in mind.

As long as dividends are paid and the price of their stock keeps going up, they are - under the tenets of Capitalism - doing exactly what they are supposed to do.

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tedh754 • Oct 17, 2018 at 11:24

Google China, and more and more Google here in America, is the new Newspeak Dictionary. Orwell would be proud.Or terrified.

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Chuck • Oct 17, 2018 at 11:19

Can we assume that Google employees exercise during lunch break by goose-stepping around the company track and saluting huge banners of Rubin and Brin? I would believe that given what a bunch of lefty libtards are obviously employed there. Do they also get free ski masks for their participation in "protest rallies"? Amazing how closet dictators can grow up in the most free nation of Earth yet wish to destroy that very freedom. SHAME!!

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gerald m serlin • Oct 17, 2018 at 09:49

There are so many problems in the world today, that I cannot keep up with them.

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Michael • Oct 17, 2018 at 09:18

The Chinese today, the rest of us tomorrow. The Matrix is no longer just a movie. It's on our doorsteps and yet all we do is take selfies and watch cats doing silly things on our smartphones.

Wake up!

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John Forbes • Oct 17, 2018 at 09:14

How on earth the US allows a COMPANY to censor free speech it is very hard to believe.I hear now that IMAM TAWIDI ( A Shia Imam ) in Adelaide has had his FACEBOOK account shut down.This is OUTRAGEOUS as he is a voice for Muslim Reform!
How can anyone let ZUKERBERG get away with things like this ????

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Albert Reingewirtz • Oct 17, 2018 at 06:32

China is not the USA, the US Constitution doesn't apply in China nor in Saudi Arabia for example. The Chinese people have to change their form of government themselves if the shoe hurts. Same for Saudi Arabia. Democracy is a wonder form of Government yet all Arabs regard democracy as "a Crusaders' idea." Someone should start a open Utube and an open Google competing. Isn't this the American way?

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